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The problem of inauthenticity, of a restless, insecure, and doubting self, is what has come to dominate psychoanalytic thought in our own time. It is also what has made the Buddha’s teachings so relevant, because the Buddha, after his initial hesitation, spoke directly and explicitly to this very problem of identity confusion.
More than any other analyst, D. W. Winnicott explored the terrain of the private self. Conscious, above all, of the fragility of the emerging individual, of her need for silent support in the difficult process of growing up, Winnicott was a master at articulating the ways in which we shut ourselves down, complying with parental demands that stem from parental anxiety rather than the needs of the child. We “impose a coherence on ourselves,” taught Winnicott, if the parental environment is not resilient enough to tolerate our falling apart, to allow our egos to unburden. This imposed coherence is what he called “False Self.” Analogous to Reich’s muscular armoring, Winnicott’s false self offers protection against exploitation or lack of interest. “It is a primitive form of self-sufficiency in the absence of nurture,” a strategy of “compliance” that permits the person to survive while hiding out from the unsympathetic parental environment. For Winnicott, and the therapists who have followed in his wake, it was the rigidity of the false self that was responsible for the ongoing sense of dissatisfaction. Prematurely separated from the nourishing attention of the mother, people lose touch with their own bodies and retreat to the confines of their minds; the thinking mind thus becomes the locus of the sense of self. But this is a disappointing and dissociated compromise, an imperfect solution that perpetuates the original deprivation and reinforces the notion of an isolated mind incapable of aliveness or spontaneity. Dukkha [suffering], for Winnicott, was the permanent isolation of the individual.
-- Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker
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